Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [24]
We had to learn to do this by listening well and being attentive, so that our responses were authentic. For me (Grace) this included learning what a friend truly is. I wrongly considered nearly anyone and everyone a friend. I served people tirelessly, even though most of my “friends” did not reciprocate in any way. Such people are not friends, but rather people God asks us to serve for different seasons, encouraging them toward maturity and serving others.
Grace and I observed devotion in marriage early on in our relationship. Her uncle John was a frail elderly man whose wife, Gladys, had to be placed in a home because of her declining health and decimated memory due to Alzheimer’s. John rented an apartment close to her care facility so he could faithfully visit her multiple times every single day for years, until the day he died. Although Gladys did not remember John or any of the days they had shared over the course of many decades, he faithfully sat with her for hours every day because—despite their marriage being difficult—she was his best friend and he loved her dearly. John could have moved on with his life, divorced her, married a woman he enjoyed, and never visited her again, and she would have been completely unaware because she remembered so little. But he loved her faithfully as a devoted friend, every day staring into the eyes of his wife who could not remember who he was or even his name.
40
Grace loved her uncle John very much, and they were close. When we began dating in high school, I, too, enjoyed getting to know John. Occasionally, Grace and I would join him as he went to visit Gladys. The night before we married, I stayed at John’s apartment, and he asked me to promise that I would love Grace and remain devoted to her no matter what. I gave him my word, and after watching his example knew exactly what he meant, as he was asking me to covenant to being Grace’s best friend.
S—Sanctifying
Author Gary Thomas asked the vital question, “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?”25 We truly do not know how selfish and sinful we are until we live with someone in marriage. Most of our dating time is spent pretending to be people we are not, and after a few years of marriage, our spouses start to discover who we truly are rather than the characters we have been acting like. The same is true for them.
Regarding our selfishness and sin, our spouses do not change us as much as they reveal us. Once we’re exposed, we have to decide if we will be changed for the good, what the Bible calls being sanctified. A husband and wife need to accept that they each are, and are each married to, a weak, failed, flawed sinner who needs loving help and patient endurance. As sinners, we all fall into sin, and without a friend we are often simply stuck, unable to get up and move on with our lives. This is why Ecclesiastes 4:9–10 says,
Two are better than one,
Because they have a good reward for their labor.
For if they fall, one will lift up his companion.
But woe to him who is alone when he falls,
For he has no one to help him up.
True friends are revealed when someone has failed and fallen into sin. Those who rush to help them up—knowing full well whom they are helping and what they have done—are true friends. We may say we are someone’s friend, but unless we are quick to pursue them in the sin they have fallen into, we are not really much of a friend. We know that we are considered a godly friend when the person in sin trusts us enough to come clean with us, be honest, and ask for our help. This is particularly true of our spouses, who need us to pursue them most diligently when